MEDIA, MATTERS: WHY NOT TAKE CONTEXT (ATTENDANCE), PLEASE

Politics is all theater. Aristotle could have told me that had I not been ignorant about his writings in high school, when I had the good fortune (I thought back then) of interviewing Ronald Reagan, who was running for president.

Seeing him, and seeing how few folks attended his talk at the local Hilton in Reagan neotribal territory in California, showed me how bankrupt the mainstream media is. Forget left/right or liberal/conservative; just give us the numbers (and I don’t mean the poll numbers).

No one mentioned how few people there were, let alone the purple hue of his Grecian Formula hair, making Reagan look like a long-lost former governor.

It’s not for nothing that all politicians complain (i.e. whine) about the established media’s unfairness to her or him — and the airing of the GOP debates, with the public whining of these politicians, hit a chord with the public.

This is where social media comes in. If the media won’t tell us how many people attend the candidates’ pep rallies, will it be on the Twitter feed? (Though who has time to collate all this data, not 538.) I’m tired of not understanding the context (people per candidate) and then hearing the “surprise” at the results of the primary.

The media needs to finance itself, but at our representational democratic expense? Why were the airways constructed as public then? Just give us the specs, please. The non-poll numbers — tell us how many people are in the theater or attended the Cruz show (not just the Trump circus).